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March 10, 2005
Pajamas! He arrived in Pajamas!
The wires report that:
"A suicide bomber blew himself up at a Shiite mosque during a funeral Thursday, killing 47 people....
"After the cloud of smoke and dust dispersed, we saw the scattered bodies of the fallen and smelled gunpowder," said Adnan al-Bayati, another witness.
At least 47 people were killed and more than 90 wounded, said Dr. Saher Maher, speaking from a hospital in the city."
Someone targeted a Shi'ite funeral in such a savage attack. But what's the top story in Yahoo top news? Or on CNN? The important stuff, of course.
A pajama-clad Michael Jackson arrived late for his trial today.
Oh, my.
Posted by zeynep at March 10, 2005 04:04 PM
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Comments
A teensy bit off your point, but is the reason we only hear about large numbers of civilian deaths in Iraq being caused by insurgent attacks because that's the only source of large numbers of civilian deaths? This isn't a rhetorical question and I've decided to go around various blogs and ask if anyone knows. Seymour Hersh said a few months ago that American bombing raids were increasing exponentially and that parts of Iraq were being turned into a free fire zone. The Lancet study probably reflected that in microcosm--if you looked at the data for the Fallujah cluster there were several air raids on that one neighborhood spaced over a period of months and presumably all of Fallujah was being hit hard, while we heard little about it. (Or if memory serves, that's what it shows--I haven't looked at the paper recently.)
Anyway, is that kind of bombing by the US still going on? Is there any way to tell? Hersh apparently had some access to the statistics on air attacks. Is anybody trying to keep track of this?
Just wondering, because I know how the Vietnam War would have looked if reporters were limited to knowledge they could get from the US and the South Vietnamese governments. The papers would be full of reports of Vietcong atrocities (some real and some actually deaths from our attacks) and virtually nothing about civilian deaths caused by us. Whether this is what is happening in Iraq I don't know.
Posted by: Donald Johnson at March 10, 2005 07:02 PM
Okay, given the lack of response I guess nobody who reads this blog knows whether we're still engaged in bombing Iraqi towns or not. It seems like the sort of question we should know the answer to and if we don't know, then people should wonder why not.
Posted by: Donald Johnson at March 13, 2005 12:25 PM
Donald - The deficiencies in media reporting from Iraq are well documented http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=767 so its hard to see what the US are doing at this exact moment. Juan Cole mentioned something about new major operations in Samarra last week http://www.juancole.com/2005/03/12-killed-26-wounded-at-baquba-roundup.html but I’ve seen no more on that.
However, one can safely presume that the coalition’s killed more civilians than the resistance from sheer weight of armour alone. The resistance doesn't have helicopter gunships, heavy artillery etc etc so even if the willingness to inflict collateral damage was greater on their part (which is definitely questionable) its the ability which is relevant, and there's no meaningful comparison to make.
This report from Atlantic Monthly states specifically that the insurgents “are responsible for fewer unintentional "collateral" casualties than are the clumsy and overarmed American forces.” http://www.ocnus.net/cgi-bin/exec/view.cgi?archive=62&num=16052&printer=1
This is the best thing I’ve read so far on the American aerial war http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2047
I covered the security situation here myself, albeit briefly as part of a general commentary http://www.democratsdiary.co.uk/2005/03/stop-war-demonstration-190305-why.html
Realise that doesn’t fully answer your question but hopefully it helps
Posted by: Diarist at March 16, 2005 09:24 AM
Thanks Diarist. Something I thought of doing, but haven't done yet is to email Les Roberts (one of the Lancet authors) and see what he knows. (Assuming he has time to reply.) Presumably he'd know as much as anyone about data on civilian casualties. Also, in one of the interviews with him that I saw online he seemed to have information on the number of bombs the US had dropped, just as Hersh knew a few months ago about the increased bombing rate. So little bits of information come out here and there.
Posted by: Donald Johnson at March 16, 2005 02:16 PM